


Cat's Out of the Bag

by jumpsoap



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, M/M, Meet-Cute, haunted doll - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-05 18:28:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21213116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jumpsoap/pseuds/jumpsoap
Summary: Prompto just wanted a normal life. Ignis wasn't aware there was any other option.





	1. Chapter 1

On a beautiful, sunny October afternoon, Prompto had nothing on his mind but buying a new pack of exam booklets from the discount supplies shop just off campus. Later in the day, maybe, if he could work up the courage, he would think about checking out a party that one of his roommates had told him about the night before. 

He was a completely ordinary, run-of-the-mill college student in his first year at the University of Lucis. He ate ramen four nights a week, had an undeclared major, and his highest ambition was to keep his grades up high enough to hold onto his scholarship.

And he was stopped in his tracks by the wailing of a supernatural entity, crying out in unearthly terror and rage from a storefront across the street.

He scowled in the general direction of the spirit causing the ruckus, scrunching up his nose as he tried to talk himself out of what he knew he would have to do.

This was the story of his life, wasn’t it?

Prompto was a completely ordinary college student, except that he was highly sensitive to the supernatural, and he had been since before he could remember. His grandpa, a crusty old man who lived in fuck-all nowhere Niflheim researching ghosts and demons and all kinds of nonsense, had whisked him away from his parents as soon as he could walk to train him in the occult arts.

He’d managed to get back to Lucis and transfer into public school several years ago, and most days he congratulated himself on not turning out to be a complete weirdo now that he had successfully become a young and unambitious adult. 

His college life would have been perfect, if he just hadn’t gone and gotten mixed up in that business with the dorm’s attic ghost right at the beginning of the semester. Someone had snapped a picture that seemed to show Prompto casting the spirit out and urging it through the veil into the next life using a chemistry textbook, a pocket flashlight, and a kitchen timer. 

That was an accurate interpretation of the picture, and Prompto was sure his grandpa would have been proud of his ingenuity with the whole bell-book-and-candle setup, but unfortunately the picture had spread along with the story, and now Prompto had a bit of a reputation around the school as a ‘ghost hunter.’

Prompto took issue with the moniker. For one thing, he didn’t _hunt _any ghosts. He just minded his own business, and the ghosts practically threw themselves in front of him so that he had to either trip over them or exorcise them.

He crossed the street and stepped up to the window, squinting through the dirty glass. It was some kind of antique store—a junk store, actually. There were piles of old furniture, toys, decorations, knick knacks, arranged just inside the window as though someone had cut a cross-section of the sitting room of an unusually eccentric and ancient great-aunt. 

It only took him a moment to identify the vessel of the agitated spirit. A doll in the shape of a little cat wearing overalls. It was threadbare and faded with age, its button eyes sagging out of its head on fraying thread. The doll was created to have a placid expression on its fuzzy face, but even without making an effort, Prompto could see the aura of the spirit that inhabited it, snarling and screeching with the desire to extract an earthly vengeance. 

What was worse, now that he had his nose pressed up against the window, Prompto could sense the rustling and whispering of several other entities within the shop, no doubt haunting other pieces of junk that he would now have to spend his food money buying just so he could do a dumb ritual and send the stupid ghosts on their way.

He sighed, hiked up his backpack, and pushed through the shop’s door, its rusty bell clattering above him as he did so.

~*~*~*~

Ignis heard the bell ring just as he was highlighting a particularly abstruse passage in the novel he was meant to be reading for his final required humanities course. “Be right with you,” he called out absently, frowning at the passage. He should have never let his flatmate talk him into taking a course in gothic literature. 

There was no response, but that wasn’t unusual. Customers didn’t typically expect attentive service in a shop of the kind his uncle owned. Still, Ignis was anxious to get a break from his homework, so he crept out from behind the counter to catch a glimpse of whoever was browsing the shelves today.

The customer was neither a cheerful parent in the area paying a visit to their child at the school, nor a gaggle of students looking to waste twenty minutes browsing the curiosities. It was a single young man, likely a student a year or two younger than Ignis himself. His face had an impatient tension to it, and he moved with purpose through the store, not acknowledging Ignis but picking up items seemingly at random and piling them into his arms without even taking a moment to consider them.

Ignis wondered for a moment if the store was being robbed, but then the young man stalked over to the counter and dumped his chosen items atop it, wiping dust from his hands. 

“Just these,” he said shortly, and finally looked Ignis in the face.

He looked familiar, Ignis realized. He looked, Ignis realized a second later, _very_ cute. 

“Uh,” the very cute man said, “They’re for sale, right?”

“Yes! Yes, of course they’re for sale,” Ignis said, hands finally doing their job and lining up the items on the counter with their price tags visible. “Just a moment, please,” he said as he began to enter the prices on the shop’s computer, shaking his head minutely at his own inattention. 

The assortment of items didn’t make any more sense together than they had when Ignis had watched the customer pick them up. There was an old camera in a cracked leather case; a tiny, crystalline music box decorated with butterflies; a dense, wind-up tabletop clock with a missing hour hand; a somewhat unsettling painting of a small, fancy boy sobbing into a handkerchief; and a cat doll with buttons for eyes that Ignis had just that morning set out in the front window of the shop. 

Most of the items were barely this side of ruined, true junk, but the cat doll was a legitimate antique, and carried something of a hefty price tag. Ignis glanced at the customer’s face as he entered the price, and, indeed, saw him blanch at the total. 

Instead of taking it back, though, the young man cursed under his breath and slung his backpack around his shoulders, plunging a hand inside and digging around. “Fine,” he said, eyes unfocused as he searched. “I have some cash in here somewhere. Can I pay part with cash and the rest on my card?”

Ignis watched him for a moment, that itch of familiarity at the back of his mind suddenly clearing into recognition. He entered his uncle’s administrator password and adjusted the price. “Ah, would you look at that,” he said as a new, much lower total flashed up on the rotable customer display. “You qualify for a bulk discount. It just took a moment to load. So sorry about that.”

“Oh,” the man said, air leaving his lungs in an audible rush of relief. He smiled, the tension in his face melting away to reveal a radiant happiness. “That’s awesome! Thank you so much, dude!”

“Think nothing of it,” Ignis said, ducking his head and busying himself wrapping the more delicate items in newspaper as Prompto inserted his payment card into the kiosk. The machine beeped, and Ignis finished packing the smaller items into a shopping bag stamped with the faded logo of the University. “Tell me,” Ignis said, handing over the bag, “Might these items be… haunted?”

The young man jumped, hand slipping on the handles of the bag, which, thankfully, Ignis was still holding securely. “What? _Haunted?_” He tried again for the bag, and this time managed to snatch it from Ignis’s hand. “No—No way, dude! Nope. Haunted! Ha. Pfft. ‘Haunted.’ Good one.”

Ignis crossed his arms on the countertop and watched him fiddle with the bag, wringing the handles in his hands. When his outburst was concluded, Ignis said, “But you are Prompto Argentum, are you not?”

“Uh, yeah,” he said, still looking down at his hands. “But, you know, like, that stuff they say about me, the ghost stuff, it’s a bunch of BS. You know that, right?” He looked up at Ignis, and seemed genuinely distressed. 

Ignis pushed himself up, away from the counter. “I’m sorry to have offended you, Prompto,” he said. “Certainly, I know it’s all simply stories.”

Color rose in Prompto’s cheeks, and he dropped his gaze again. “N-no, you didn’t— It’s stupid, don’t worry about it, I shouldn’t let it get to me.”

“Rumors hurt,” Ignis said, reaching across the counter to touch Prompto’s wrist. “I understand that. I assure you, I’m not typically the type to attend to gossip. It is, as you say, a ‘bunch of BS.’”

Prompto snorted at Ignis’s attempt at a Lucian accent, and Ignis was glad to have cheered him up, even a little. 

Realizing he’d let his fingertips linger a little too long on the warm skin of Prompto’s wrist, Ignis withdrew his hand. “So, what is the purpose of your purchase today? I admit to being a tad curious. Most people don’t buy anything at all in here, let alone enough to qualify for one of our celebrated bulk discounts.”

“Oh, uh,” Prompto said. “Uh. Photography!”

“Is that so?” Ignis smiled, trying to seem encouraging. Perhaps the young man was shy about his art.

“Yyyep,” Prompto said. “Love photography. Way into it. Can never have enough stuff to, uh, snap pics of!”

“In that case, I very much hope you’ll stop by again to browse our wares,” Ignis said. “I can’t say any of it is particularly photo-worthy, though.” An idea occurred to him, and it escaped his lips before he could stop it. “Perhaps if I see something come in that might catch your eye, I could set it aside for you..?”

“Wow, really?” Prompto said. “That’s super nice.” 

Hoping that the racing of his heart wasn’t quite as loud as it seemed within his own ears, Ignis pulled a scrap of receipt paper from the roll and slid it across the counter, along with a pen. “It’s no trouble at all, I assure you. If you could just leave me a phone number, then I’ll be able to let you know when I see something.”

“Oh,” Prompto said, that blush creeping up his face again. “_Oh._” Then, to Ignis’s delight and immense relief, he smiled and picked up the pen, scratching out his phone number on the piece of paper. He tapped it with the point of the pen when he was done, looking up at Ignis through his lashes. “You don’t—don’t have to wait till you find any cool, y’know,” he said. “That’s my cell, so you can send me a message, um, whenever.”

Their fingers brushed when Ignis took the scrap of paper. He tucked it into his novel and smiled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Prompto tucked the portrait of the crying boy under his arm, swung the shopping bag over his shoulder, and exited the store, throwing a glance tinged with a small, shy smile back at Ignis just before he slipped out through the door.

Neither of them noticed the little cat doll, which had fallen to the floor without a sound before it ever made it into the shopping bag. It lay on its side beneath the sales counter, glossy button eyes reflecting the reddening light of the beautiful afternoon outside as it turned to evening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This came to me in a dream about a week ago. I hope you enjoy! Thanks to [kiwi](https://twitter.com/flykiwiflyaway) for encouraging me and helping me come up with the various haunted items Prompto has to buy.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Yes I DID accidentally delete this chapter in a panic after accidentally posting a draft of a completely different work that I didn't mean to publish. My sincere apologies. Blue and Snapple, I did receive your nice comments and I will cherish them in my email inbox where they are safe from my foolishness. Thank you.)

“Shit,” Prompto said, pacing the space between the beds in his dorm room, pulling at his own hair. “Fuck!” 

On his bed, four haunted artifacts lay in a line, the ghosts within them quieter now than they had been in the antique shop. They were watching him have a miniature, seething meltdown, and had wisely decided to make themselves a little less conspicuous for the moment. 

He sat down in the middle of the room, covered his eyes with his hands, and took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said to himself. “Okay.”

So he had lost one creepy doll with one very angry ghost inside of it. Fine. It was just as though he’d never found it, right? One less thing to worry about.

But no, he admitted as he dragged his hands down his face. No, it wasn’t like that at all. The stupid ghost was still very much his problem, and he knew it. He had a responsibility to track it down, now that he knew of its existence. It could be causing all sorts of mayhem out there, haunting people…

Haunting one very specific person.

Prompto fumbled his phone out of his pocket. He had no messages or missed calls, and he tossed the phone onto his bed. He had given the right number to the antique shop guy, hadn’t he? Prompto did sometimes mix up numbers, but he was sure he’d been careful this time. Could the guy have changed his mind about Prompto? Had it just been a joke?

Maybe it meant that he hadn’t left the cat doll at the antique shop after all, or at least that the man hadn’t noticed it if he had. 

“You guys.” He grabbed his coat and pointed at the items laid out on his bed. “Stay right there.”

He retraced his steps, walking through campus with a flashlight, checking under benches and in flower beds. It was no use. He couldn’t sense the ghost’s aura anywhere.

Prompto found himself back at the front window of the antique store, dark and quiet. He had called the number listed for the shop at the beginning of his search, but the phone had simply rung for a minute, two minutes, longer, until he had to hang up.

Even from outside, he could tell that the junk shop had been emptied of all spirits, living or dead. He pressed his palm against the cold glass for a moment, then let it fall, and dragged his feet back to his dorm.

It took Prompto the rest of the night to exorcise the four artifacts he had managed to bring home from the antique shop. His phone buzzed partway through the ritual on the clock. He jumped out of his circle of protection to check it while the clock chimed furiously, a phantom hour hand appearing on its face to count rapidly down to his death. 

Prompto groaned when he reached his phone—just his roommate, asking him if he was going to be at the party that night. Not even close to the handsome antique shop guy (who was now in terrible danger). He replied with a negative and sulked back over to restart the ritual amid the manic laughter of the clock ghost echoing around his dormitory. 

“I didn’t even get his name,” Prompto lamented, redrawing his circle and standing to face the looming spectre before him. “Yeah, yeah, I see you.” 

By the time he finished with all four, dawn was warming the blinds of the dorm and Prompto was swaying on his feet. He bent down to pick up the painting—which now depicted a very happy boy waving with his handkerchief—and slid it down into the space between his bed and the wall. 

He would figure out something to do with it later. Maybe he really would take some photos of it and the other junk. Then at least he would have something to show the shop guy, if—

“Crap, did he call?” Prompto found his phone again and checked the screen, but again there was no communication from the antique shop employee. 

Prompto glanced longingly at his bed, but instead of crawling in he ducked underneath to fish out a warm energy drink from his stash down there, and then headed out for the antique shop again.

~*~*~*~

Dread clutched at Ignis’s chest when he approached his uncle’s antique store around noon that day, fingering the keys in his pocket.

There was a person curled up in the doorway to the shop, asleep—he hoped. They were huddled inside of a hoodie, a can of Sylkis Boost leaking its last drops onto the sidewalk from their lap. A student, perhaps, sleeping off a hangover.

They didn’t stir when Ignis approached, which did nothing to ease the apprehension that had settled into Ignis’s belly. He crouched down and gingerly reached out to nudge the unconscious person’s shoulder.

The person was not dead, at least.

They shrieked when Ignis touched them, jolting upright, their used-up can sent flying into the sidewalk. Ignis fell back onto his rear.

“_Prompto_?” He asked.

It had to have been Prompto. The hood had fallen back to reveal a mess of blond hair, wide, blue eyes, a freckled face that was considerably paler than it had appeared the day before. Indeed, Prompto looked as though he had been awake for seventy-two hours since the last time Ignis had seen him.

“Junk shop guy! You came! Hi!” Prompto faced Ignis on his hands and knees, face contorted into what he may have intended to be a reassuring smile.

“...Hello,” Ignis replied. “Can I help you?”

“Yes! Yeah. Please.” Prompto brushed his wild hair back out of his face. “So. I think maybe I left something here yesterday.” 

“Oh, the doll?” Ignis got to his feet, sweeping dust off his pants, and Prompto followed him up. “Yes, I have it here.” He picked up his messenger bag from where he had dropped it and pulled the cat doll from where it was nestled just inside.

Prompto made a sound of relief that wasn’t at all appropriate for a public space. His face lit up, but his eyes still had a wild, manic look. He plucked the doll from Ignis’s grasp. “Why didn’t you call me?” he demanded.

“I’m afraid I left your number in the shop,” Ignis said, although now he was considering throwing the number away as soon as he found it again, and maybe filing a restraining order. Prompto’s erratic behavior had seemed charming the day before; today, it was a little more alarming. “I had planned to call you as soon as I got in today. I didn’t realize it was so important to you, or I would have—”

“Wait,” Prompto interrupted him, gaze fixed on the doll. “Are you sure this is the same doll?”

Despite the situation, Ignis couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m fairly certain,” he said. “I don’t exactly maintain a collection of the things.” 

Prompto dragged a hand down his face, fingernails leaving white lines as they dug into his cheek. “You brought this home with you last night?” he asked.

“Yes,” Ignis said.

“Do you live with anybody? Are there kids?”

“Excuse me? No, I don’t have any _children_.” What in the world could have been in that doll? Drugs?

“Any kids," Prompto said, grabbing him by his suspenders and shaking him.

Ignis stepped back, pushing him away. “I’m sorry, but I think—” 

He was interrupted by his phone ringing.

Prompto’s gaze flicked to Ignis’s pocket and back to his face. Ignis moved away and answered the phone. “Is something wrong?”

“_Why would something be wrong_?” His flatmate answered.

“Gladio. Why are you calling?”

“_Yeah, well, I guess you got me there. Listen, Stella is fixed, right? Only, she’s been yowling like crazy all morning, and she just puked up a real nasty hairball. I shut her in the bathroom cus I’m about to go to class, but do you need me to take her to the vet or something?”_

Ignis looked to Prompto, who was giving him a meaningful—and slightly crazed—look, although he shouldn’t have been able to overhear any of what Gladio was saying.

“That’s fine, I’ll come back now and check on her. You can go on to your class.” Ignis ended the call and rounded on Prompto. “I need you to explain to me, right now, what exactly your doll did to my cat.”


End file.
